That short fiction can be potent is no secret. From Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down (possession of which was punishable by death in parts of occupied Europe) to Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and Thomas Mann's oeuvre, the special qualities of the form are acknowledged. Publishers such as Melville House in Brooklyn, or London's Peirene Press, have made the genre their sole focus, while the Left Bank establishment Shakespeare and Co celebrates it through the newly-launched Paris Literary Prize. Vive the novella.

Discards are wasteful, damaging and need to be stopped. And measures to bring them to an end are long overdue. Good money is spent catching fish that you then have to throw away with little prospect of them reviving. It's a crazy waste of marine resources and of the effort put in by fishermen. Discards are a big problem for most of the seas around the UK. They cause unwanted mortality in fish stocks and they undermine fishery management. They are no good to us as consumers, they are no good to the health of fish stocks and they are no good to the fishermen.

My grandma sounded very pleased on the phone earlier; she'd just persuaded my uncle to come round and collect her plants. Not all of them. Just the precious collection of succulent plants that sit in pots on her balcony – they are off to spend the cold spell in his greenhouse. Succulents are desert plants that survive in the wild by filling their leaves with stored water – a reservoir that makes them prone to frost damage when the temperature goes down. Which it does, every so often, in the non-deserts of mid-Oxfordshire.

As Barry Hearn sets about implementing his masterplan to drag snooker up by its boot straps, it could be that the long-term wellbeing of the sport rests in the hands of an introverted 15-year-old boy from Belgium.